Patrick Ness · 317 pages
Rating: (35.4K votes)
“Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Feelings don't try to kill you, even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You're responsible for its consequences, you're responsible for treating it. But...you're not responsible for causing it. You're not morally at fault for it. No more than you would be for a tumor.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“The mistake of every young person is to think they're the only ones who see darkness and hardship in the world."
...
"The mistake of every adult, though, is to think darkness and hardship aren't important to young people because we'll grow out of it. Who cares if we will? Life is happening to us now, just like it's happening to you.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I feel like I'm way down this deep, deep hole and I'm looking up and all there is is this little dot of light and I have to shout at the top of my lungs for anyone to hear me and even when I do, I say the wrong thing or they don't really listen or they're just humouring me.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We share out craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What's important is that I know how much you worry about shit. And what's also important is that I know a big part of your worry is that, no matter what group of friends you're in, no matter how long you've known them, you always assume you're the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worth part of being young. So many of your decisions aren't yours; they're made by other people. Sometimes they're made badly by other people. Sometimes they're made by other people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. The bastards.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But I don't care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don't think they're real or important or you think that we'll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that's not really my business. I can't tell you what's real for you. But in return, you can't say what's real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Sometimes you need things rather than just thoughts.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We're just as screwed up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But it's a tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“You always assume you're the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We're each other's questions, aren't we? The question that never gets an answer.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Now you're sure we are not going to be murdered?" Call Me Steve says, actually looking a bit nervous. "Prom night. Group of diverse teens. Remote cabin…”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“If you're too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What's the point of lying about anything? We could keep being too afraid to say we don't know stuff and then the future will come and eat us anyway and we'll regret not doing all that stuff we wished we did.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.
You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I'm choosing my own story.
Because if you can't do that, you might as well just give up.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What do you do when your dreams are about to come true?" she asks. "No one ever tells you. They tell you to chase them, but what happens when you actually catch one?"
"You enjoy it. Do your best, try not to be a dick.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Mikey," she says, but not like she's about to say anything more, just like she's identifying me, making a place for me here that's mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I'm grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn't say it felt this sad.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“It'll make you look rugged,' Mel says.
'Because I woke up this morning,' I say, 'and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I don't do pity kisses," she says. "I don't do pity anything. Pity is patronizing. Pity is an assumption of superiority."
"That sounds like your dad."
"It is my dad, but he's right. He says kindness is better. Kindness is the most important thing of all. Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.
Aren't we?”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“The wind picks up a little more (Terribly sorry, I imagine it saying; apparently, the wind is British, wondering how it got all the way over here)”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Everything's always ending. But everything's always beginning, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Patrick Ness
Born place: in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, The United States
Born date January 1, 1971
See more on GoodReads
“here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.”
― Joe Haldeman, quote from The Forever War
“There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved through trying was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? People spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from About a Boy
“Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.”
― Jonathan Franzen, quote from Freedom
“Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.”
― quote from Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
The Sordid Promise
The LDS Scriptures:...
The Proverbs 31 Lady...
The Captive Mind
Broken
Presumed GuiltyBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
